With Professor David Nutt's synthetic beer, we’d never learn to live with the
consequences of our behaviour

Professor David Nutt, the scientist who was the Labour government’s drugs adviser, this week appeared on the Today programme seeking investment for substances that mimic the effect of alcohol.

Why bother? Because a drug that’s less pharmacologically “messy” than alcohol could deliver the pleasures of your favourite tipple – minus the harm. He suggests that in a country with thousands of alcohol-related deaths a year, it’s time we looked into safer alternatives.

The vision is for “synthetic beer”, to leave the imbiber without a hangover: consequence-free (and so guilt-free?) drinking. During the interview, Professor Nutt said: “I think this would be a serious revolution in health… just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionise the smoking of tobacco.”

A guilt-free drink doesn’t make me think about smoking (and thinking about smoking will most likely be banned soon – even e-cigarettes are forbidden on open-air station platforms, suggesting that the ban was about the ruling class rubbing out behaviour they found displeasing, as much as it was about public health). Guilt-free drinking makes me think of a brave new world, and not in a good way.

Everyone remembers that Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel is named after a speech given by Miranda in The Tempest:

What I’d forgotten, until the thought of “synthetic beer” crossed my mind, is that Shakespeare is having a laugh at Miranda. Her words aren’t sparked by any particularly transcendent sight, but rather by a group of intoxicated, shipwrecked sailors. She’s never seen anything like it before, and it strikes her as “beauteous.”

There are many people who’d welcome Professor Nutt’s pill (let’s call it “soma”, as Huxley does, for convenience), if it had the Miranda effect: that public displays of drunkenness would become so rare that the sight of them would move one to poetry. But wouldn’t soma (as Huxley predicts) make inebriation more common, not less?

With apologies to Miranda, who really should have got out more, crowds of rowdy drunks are the opposite of “beauteous”. Guilt-free, hangover-free inebriation would deliver squadrons of such anti-beauty. To develop a soma misses the point about alcohol’s role in the world.

The point is the guilt; the point is the hangover. Learning to manage your alcoholic intake is, for most, part of the road travelled from infant to adult. Such lessons (of self-control) cannot be learnt if choices become consequence-free: to drink must be to volunteer oneself for risk.

Bluntly, the risk is that you won’t control your intake: will you have the strength to stop at just the one glass? Or will you weaken, and finish the bottle? If there were no risk (of a hangover, of being too drunk in the morning to drive), would you nibble delicately at just one tab of soma, then stop? Or would you guzzle at more and more of it, preferring your reality to be cushioned, from dawn until dusk? Take away the choice, and I suspect – as did Huxley – that we’d prefer to remain infantilised.

There’s a slight contradiction in my reasoning. I react against political puritans, nannying about wine consumption, but at the same time I’m worrying that were drink to become consequence-free, too many people would spend their time sozzled.

Only idealists expect political reasoning to be internally self-consistent. And I don’t trust idealists, whether of the political or scientific class. Professor Nutt resigned from his post in the last government because the then-home secretary refused to act on his risk ranking for substance abuse.

I regretted Professor Nutt’s argument because it suggested that political decisions should be determined solely on the basis of scientific evidence, whereas, correctly and by definition, they take place on the substrate of culture. Alcohol may be more dangerous than cannabis, for example. It doesn’t necessarily follow that drink should be proscribed, and cannabis legalised. Consistency is for mathematics: humans require a little more leeway.

So, yes, drinking is bad for the individual and for society. But we also know that our culture has evolved, over millennia, customs to handle it. I feel sorry for those who cannot control their addiction, but not enough to risk the well-being that comes, for the vast majority, from being forced to live with the consequences of our actions.

Every beer-drinker knows that there’s an appointment with reality – however long-delayed – at the bottom of one of those pint glasses. Maybe not this one, maybe not the next – but it’s coming. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think we’re better off that way.